The history of slavery in the United States cannot be covered in a brief article, but one point that is important to address in the context of contemporary “antiracist” debates is the notion that slavery was historically supported by the South and opposed by the North. The aim of antiracists, in advancing that notion, is to justify the destruction of Confederate monuments, the proscribing of Confederate flags, and the renaming of military bases. It is, therefore, worth reiterating that this simplistic notion of a pro-slavery South and anti-slavery North is incorrect and does not justify contemporary antiracist historical revisionism.
Antiracism is defined as “a paradigm located within Critical Theory utilized to explain and counteract the persistence and impact of racism.” One of the main targets of the antiracist reinterpretation of US history concerns the constitutionality of Lincoln’s war against the South. From the prevailing antiracist narrative, one might easily suppose that Lincoln’s main purpose in waging this war was to end slavery. After all, this interpretation presumes, the South had no right to keep slaves as the Constitution did not explicitly endorse or legitimize slavery and the North, therefore, fought to make the South comply with the Constitution.
That narrative is partly fueled by ambiguous language in official sources such as the US Congress, which gives the impression that slavery was a Southern practice opposed by the North:
Conflicts over slavery, which had been practiced in the British colonies of North America for over a century often pitted delegates from southern states that relied heavily on slave labor against northern states whose inhabitants increasingly opposed the practice on moral grounds.
That source also mentions that “the Constitution’s original text did not specifically refer to slavery.” Such historical accounts have led some wrongly to suppose that slavery must have been unlawful.
However, such a reading of the Constitution would be simplistic. As Michael Zuckert observes, although “the words ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ appeared nowhere in the text as of ratification, but were instead replaced with awkward workarounds,” the absence of these words should not be carried too far in understanding the constitutionality of slavery. He notes that, “The Constitution did in fact lend legal support to slavery in the states; it was not, as some neo-Lincolnians would have it, an unambiguously anti-slavery document.” In his view, “The existence of slavery was accepted by the [Constitutional Convention] delegates, but it was not endorsed.” A key issue mentioned by Zuckert, which many people today overlook, is that there would be no reason to expect the Constitution explicitly to prescribe rules on slavery one way or the other. Zuckert observes that “the text fails to even contemplate a federal power to deal with slavery in the states,” adding that, “Instead, the Constitution’s text accepted slavery as an institution of the states that chose to have it.”
This debate about the constitutionality of slavery has been reignited by antiracist interpretations of Lincoln’s war as having been motivated primarily by abolitionist fervor. To support that view, the impression is given that abolitionism was the prevailing ideology of the Northern states and the primary reason why they supported Lincoln’s war. That error is arrived at by conflating distinct issues—beginning with the false premise that the South seceded to defend slavery, followed by wrongly reasoning that the South must, therefore, have fought purely in a bid to defend slavery, and from there it is a short step to concluding that the North must have been fighting to end slavery. Philip Leigh explains:
The Righteous Cause Myth is a natural consequence of the false insistence that the South fought for nothing but slavery. Thus, if the South waged war only to preserve slavery, then it logically follows that the Yankees waged war for the sole purpose of freeing the slaves. It is a morally comfortable viewpoint for historians who came of age during and after the twentieth century civil rights movement. But it’s as phony and useless as a football bat.
Therefore, Philip Leigh is right to point out that, “The widespread northern myth that the Confederates went to the battlefield to perpetuate slavery is just that, a myth… Southerners fought to defend their homes. The more pertinent question is to ask why Northerners fought.”
Unfree labor in the North
The argument that the North fought because they were opposed to slavery ignores the fact that Northern states, notably Rhode Island, played a leading role in the slave trade. New England states later made a concerted effort to distance themselves from slavery, and “Righteous Causers” argue that the North soon evolved to a point where they were prepared to fight to end slavery. In his article “‘The Whole North Is Not Abolitionized’: Slavery’s Slow Death in New Jersey, 1830-1860,” James J. Gigantino II observes that, “New Englanders hoped to disown their slave past and create an imagined North free of slavery in contrast to an enslaved South.” However, the notion that by 1860 the North would wage war on the South, driven by the strength of their opposition to slavery, is undermined by the extent to which slavery continued in the North even on the eve of the war.
New Jersey is an illustrative case. Gigantino argues that, under the gradual abolition of slavery in New Jersey and other states in the North, many born into slavery remained “slaves for a term.” Although this could be argued to be servitude rather than chattel slavery, as it was limited to a term of up to twenty five years, they were treated by their masters in the same manner as slaves: “Not seeking to disown but rather to extend slavery, Jersey masters saw few differences between these children and their parents during their period of servitude.”
Gigantino emphasizes that the ambiguity and informality of the language of slavery during this period is often at odds with official records and many were formally recorded as free despite being, in practice, slaves: “For example, a black woman named Catherine was recorded in both the 1840 and 1850 censuses as free, yet her master sold her as ‘a slave for life’ in 1856.” That was only four years before—as antiracists invite us to believe—the same master who sold Catherine, and the purchaser to whom she was sold, would both wage war on the South to free the slaves.
Nor was this an exceptional case, as Gigantino shows. Nor indeed were such cases peculiar to New Jersey: “this underreporting of non-freedom did not just occur in New Jersey; slavery survived elsewhere in the North, especially in Pennsylvania.” According to Gigantino, “an estimated quarter of New Jersey’s 1830 black population remained in some form of unfree labor.” Many of these were, in fact, still enslaved (or serfs held in the manner of slaves) when Lincoln invaded the South. Gigantino points out that “in New Jersey, gradual abolition progressed even more slowly than in New England and was not complete until after the Civil War. Therefore, Jersey slaveholders still found slavery and bound labor important as the sectional crisis unfolded.”
Moreover, far from the impression often given today by antiracists, abolitionists were not as influential in the North as might be supposed. Gigantino observes that in New Jersey, “despite their best efforts, abolitionists never convinced the general public to support immediate freedom for Jersey blacks or advanced strong protections for fugitive slaves as in other northern states.” Gigantino traces the shift from the terminology of slavery to “servitude” and “apprentices for life.” His analysis “disputes the contention that a monolithic ‘free’ North stood in opposition to a ‘slave’ South and shows that northerners understood slavery and freedom on a much more complicated continuum, rather than as polar opposites.”
The relevance of this for contemporary debates is not how to describe or classify different types of unfree labor in both North and South. The point is that it debunks the antiracist theory that slavery or “racism” was a peculiar feature of the South, and that the Northern invasion of the South was motivated by the opposition of Northerners to slavery and their desire to free the Southern slaves from a life of bondage and racism.
In the Northern abolition debates no reliance was placed on the notion that slavery was in any sense unconstitutional. The debate instead concerned practical questions as to the extent to which black labor was free or unfree, and what was to be done with fugitive slaves who escaped to border states like New Jersey (which at the time, as Gigantino notes, was regarded as a border state: “New Jersey’s geographic position on the South’s northern border forced it to deal with a rising number of fugitive slaves in the 1830s and 1840s”). The notion that there was any doubt at the time as to the constitutionality of slavery, and the theory that the North would invade the South because they considered the South to be acting unconstitutionally by holding slaves, are, therefore, without foundation. That being the case, the justification for destroying historic Confederate monuments as a way of showcasing “antiracism” is also unsound.
